The Guggenheim and PETA, on Animals and Art

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/17/opinion/guggenheim-peta-animals-art.html

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To the Editor:

The Times has recently dedicated significant coverage to the corrosive impact of digital media on public discourse and private lives. Unfortunately, your Oct. 13 editorial “The Guggenheim Censors Itself” misses the opportunity to put the recent firestorm against the Guggenheim Museum, initiated and fueled by social media, into this context.

Over five days, because of the content of three works in our exhibition “Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World,” our institution and individuals on our staff were methodically targeted by social media posts, online petition comments, and email and personal voice mail messages numbering in the many thousands. In some cases, these messages threatened violence. As we should all know by now, such electronic assaults can be difficult to trace to their source and the threats they portend equally challenging to secure against.

Such barrages of outrage have become increasingly common in today’s public discourse. Contrary to your editorial’s suggestion, these cyberattacks leveled at the Guggenheim did not allow for meaningful debate.

We want the public to know that we have worked with the artists to mark the absence in our galleries of the three pieces we had intended to present. These works, along with the nearly 150 others on view, are included in the scholarly catalog that accompanies the exhibition. We regard the decision we reached as painful but necessary in order to protect our staff and visitors, the art and our landmarked building.

We look to initiate a more considered discussion of the swift and far-reaching attacks with which the Guggenheim and other cultural institutions must now contend.

RICHARD ARMSTRONG, NEW YORK

The writer is director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation.

To the Editor:

Most people agree that true works of art showcase an artist’s creativity and talent, instead of cheap shock value. The Guggenheim Museum was right to pull three cruel and gratuitous animal displays from its new show.

There is nothing intellectually provocative about dog fighting or insects devouring one another. The Chinese artists who created these displays can defend them as esoteric imagery, but the miserable lives of dogs forced to fight or the deaths of caged animals are incontrovertibly real.

The abuses perpetrated against animals throughout China are often incomprehensible. Animals languish in cramped and filthy cages in zoos, circuses hang bears by their necks to train them to walk upright, and animals are skinned alive for their fur. Animal protection laws are nonexistent. Withdrawing these pieces sends a strong message to China and its artists that animals are not props and that they deserve respect.

The Guggenheim can take a lesson from this debacle by following the example of the College Art Association, which has several principles in place for artists engaging in any practice using live animals, including that “no work of art should, in the course of its creation, cause physical or psychological pain, suffering, or distress to an animal.”

We agree that museums can and should continue to provoke thought, discussion and debate. But what museums should not do is become circus sideshows.

BEN WILLIAMSON, LOS ANGELES

The writer is senior international media director for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.